Putting aside that there are new hairstyles the thing with wow, that I think is one of it's more noteworthy flaws since it hurts immersion, is that it's designed to be played with the camera far out. I normally play a feral druid. One day I decided that I'd mix things up and raid as balance. About a hour into the raid 'Oh hey, Khatar's playing a Boomkin'. If people aren't noticing that I suddenly was a 9 foot tall laser chicken they aren't going to notice that you dyed your armor blue. That makes it a hard sell to put dev time into dyes or any other little thing that customizes characters.

Plus it'd make it a lot harder to embarrass paladins if they can dye their pink power ranger armor.

I always thought it was just me that never really "noticed" the armor in WoW. I only remember what a couple of the tier sets look like, and I think that's only because I've looked at some of them in pictures outside the game before.

One thing that's always bothered me is that a lot of chest pieces, for instance, look completely "flat"...there's textures on them but you can easily see that they're textures instead of it feeling like they're wearing something that's three-dimensional. Have they fixed that a bit with Cataclysm?

I am disappointed in WoW. I truly want to like the game every time I play, but it seems like the developers honestly don't give a crap about the player base. I'm no elitist and don't really know much about the game mechanics to complain about that aspect of the game. What I want to complain about is the lack of customization and content in the game.

This game has been out what, 6 years? Why has there been no sort of visual improvement to the original races yet? Why is there still no form of housing in the game? Why can't you name warlock pets? Why can't you change the color or at least choose the model of pets? Why are most mounts and armors simple re-colorings of old armors and mounts? Why is there such limited music in the game? No dyes? No new hairstyles? There are a million other things I can complain about..but I can't remember them all right now!

-No big improvements to original races because they want it to run on all sorts of PCs. This is a common complaint. At least the water/sun effects are much nicer =\-No guild housing because they put time into main cities (which look much better imo) and want people to spend their time in the cities. There may be other reasons, but that's the main one.-You can't name Warlock pets because they aren't pets. They are demons you summon from the other world. They already have names.-Model of pets? Warlocks have lots of different options for pets.. 5-7 iirc.-Armors are recolored of older models because developers are lazy/don't care. Common complaint and I agree with you. As far as mounts go, the mounts ARE more unique if you see the endgame mounts. Check out the PVP Gladiator mounts and the Dungeonmaster drakes. Some are overlap, but still pretty nice.-Music isn't that limited. Most zones have their own music. Most people couldn't care less because they play with sound down/mp3s playing so it's not something you see devs talk about much.-Dyes would be nice but hairstyles don't matter much. Most of the time, you can't see the hair anyone if someone has a helmet on. Not really a deal breaker. Dyes won't happen anytime in the near future because different dungeon sets are separated by different color. Regular = X color. Heroic = Y color. It's extremely lazy imo.

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Putting aside that there are new hairstyles the thing with wow, that I think is one of it's more noteworthy flaws since it hurts immersion, is that it's designed to be played with the camera far out.

Missed this. Yeah, that's a big part of it too. Most people who do dungeons set their draw-distance to max through console settings so they can zoom out really far. You can barely tell what kind of armor you're wearing at that point let alone color/hair. Still see where you're coming from since you aren't zoomed out all the time you play.

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One thing that's always bothered me is that a lot of chest pieces, for instance, look completely "flat"...there's textures on them but you can easily see that they're textures instead of it feeling like they're wearing something that's three-dimensional. Have they fixed that a bit with Cataclysm?

Nope. Probably won't until they touch the player models unfortunately.

All right, we are going to use a fan brush here and uh why don't you take some hunter green and we are going to put a happy little bush right down over here in the corner there and that'll just be our little secret and if you tell anyone that that bush is there I will come to your house and I will cut you.

I must admit, I'm really enjoying doing some of the remade quests in Azeroth. Granted, I never really did many quests because I used RAF for all my characters+ instance runs, so I can't really compare.

The new leveling zones are amazing. It's easy to level 80-85 in 12-24 hours, and if you choose to you won't get bored questing at all; they did a great job spicing their quests up. Dungeons are also a massive improvement: regular 81+ dungeons are as difficult/more difficult than Wrath heroics were, while the Cataclysm Heroics are much more along the lines of BC. Some of the bosses will punish you and test each aspect of your group. If it's your group's first time there, expect to wipe a number of times. Some of the harder fights I've run into took an hour plus to kill, though a lot of it was figuring out strategies, which wont be needed a second time. Still, mistakes are punished harshly and the fights are tightly tuned to your healers mana (they're finishing fights OOM, or below 3%) so everyone has to be on the ball.

Over all I'm extremely impressed by the expansion. New content feels a little "small" but I know most of that is that I haven't begun raiding or PvPing yet, nor have I taken the time to properly explore the old world. I start raiding next week and will report back on raid content then.

Man, my fucking paladin feels so weak. I don't know if it's the new mechanics or if they got the nerf bat while I wasn't playing or what, but I had to bubble the very first time I pulled more than one enemy. :P Divine Storm in particular feels like it's lost a lot of its heft.

I like the worgen starting area. The worgen themselves...not so much. :P

Man, my fucking paladin feels so weak. I don't know if it's the new mechanics or if they got the nerf bat while I wasn't playing or what, but I had to bubble the very first time I pulled more than one enemy. :P Divine Storm in particular feels like it's lost a lot of its heft.

I like the worgen starting area. The worgen themselves...not so much. :P

Goblins are totally my favorite race in the game now.

Lol man.. why are goblins your favorite race? My little brother is also fixated on making a goblin if he ever plays again. I personally think gnomes are my favorite race, even though I never made one. They are like midgets, but cute and funny. Now that they can become priests, I might actually transfer my BOA stuff and make one. My only real pet peeve is that you get all this crazy awesome looking gear, but you're like 2feet tall so you can barely see it!

Man, my fucking paladin feels so weak. I don't know if it's the new mechanics or if they got the nerf bat while I wasn't playing or what, but I had to bubble the very first time I pulled more than one enemy. :P Divine Storm in particular feels like it's lost a lot of its heft.

Divine Storm is now akin to a rogue's Fan of Knives--it's meant solely as an AoE. The target cap has been lifted for that reason. It shares a cooldown with Crusader Strike but isn't a guaranteed Holy Power generator, so it's kind of a trade off... You mostly just feel weak because mobs are buffed and your crit/hit/haste/etc are dropping as you level. Just remember to keep up Inquisiton, and Templar's Verdict/Exorcism hits like a truck.

So what I found with my paladin is that the gear that I had was not sufficient to even do the first couple of quests in Cata. The problem is that I had just gotten to 80 and hadn't done much with her. It took me a long time to do the first kill quests in Hyjal, until I went back and made some new gear, then she started doing ok damage.

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All right, we are going to use a fan brush here and uh why don't you take some hunter green and we are going to put a happy little bush right down over here in the corner there and that'll just be our little secret and if you tell anyone that that bush is there I will come to your house and I will cut you.

So I had my first raid night last night. Only one kill, and it certainly wasn't Wrath-easy. Where the much less-skilled guild (rank 5000-ish) I was in this time last year was able to kill three bosses on the first night of Icecrown Citadel, my current world top 200 guild took an hour and a half to snag our first kill. We also wiped for another hour and a half on the second boss. To be fair, some of the difficulty is not having timers and no released, solid strategies yet, as well as some undergeared healers, but so far the fights are way more fun than they've been since Ulduar. Love it.